‘Mirror Starts Moving Without Me’ by Pom Pom Squad
‘Mirror Starts Moving Without Me’ by Pom Pom Squad
Pom Pom Squad leader Mia Berrin sings as though there is no pleasure without danger, or sex without death. As though she’ll find a way to wrap herself around you, she’ll yet leave enough room to slip a sharpened knitting needle between your fifth and sixth ribs. And as though she’ll then tearfully stab herself because she can’t live without you.
If that seems melodramatic, then it is also incredibly alluring within the rock‘n’roll poetry of Pom Pom Squad’s first album, 2021’s Death of a Cheerleader, and it remains a siren call on Mirror Starts Moving Without Me.
The audience adulation and critical appreciation for Cheerleader almost inevitably bleed into the music and lyrics of Mirror, but Berrin and the Squad don’t render their enmeshed identities unrecognizable with tilts toward pop and self-reflection.
An artful self-awareness connects the two long-players: “Downhill” leads off the new release with pop-punk signifiers while Berrin also alludes to a yearlong turmoil and coyly murmurs an oblique reference to a key Plastics line from Mean Girls. And “Street Fighter” revisits titular motifs from Cheerleader without looking back too many times.
Co-producing and co-writing with Stolen Jars musician Cody Fitzgerald, Berrin explores classicist sad-girl piano-and-acoustic-guitar balladry with “Everybody’s Moving On,” fidgets like an older sister to Olivia Rodrigo (and perhaps a younger sister to Lana Del Rey) while surrounded by the wealth of “Montauk,” and echoes the midtempo jangle of R.E.M.’s “Driver 8” for “Messages.”
Berrin pirouettes toward statelier arrangements with “Doll Song,” although her words reject the poise that someone else might want to push onto her, and electric guitars cut through the velvet of “The Tower” before a feathery coda sews up the slashes. Still, Berrin’s voice is Pom Pom Squad’s best seamstress, flaunting the colorful threads holding together a patchwork made from artistic and mental contradictions.
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Get Mirror Starts Moving Without Me at Amazon here.
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